MANKATO — Recent charges filed against a St. Peter man allege that DNA analysis linked him to a 2015 sexual assault of a teen girl in Mankato.
Lazarous Lazaro Thomas, 27, faces felonies for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, second-degree criminal sexual conduct, third-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor and fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor in Blue Earth County District Court.
A criminal complaint states the incident occurred Sept. 18, 2015, with a girl between ages 13 and 16 telling police a man had climbed through her bedroom window and sexually assaulted her before fleeing.
Police arrived on scene and investigated the case for months but couldn’t identify a suspect. Sexual assault examiners collected DNA from the girl within hours of the incident, leading to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to create a DNA profile of the suspect.
The BCA’s database showed no match for the profile at the time.
In June 2022, the BCA laboratory alerted Mankato police to a possible link between Thomas and the 2015 sexual assault, according to the complaint. Court records show he was charged with credit card fraud, trespassing and other offenses in May and June 2022.
After the BCA requested a DNA sample from Thomas for confirmation, a Mankato detective obtained a search warrant for it on April 24 and sent a sample to the BCA. Results from July 10 reportedly indicated two swabs from the girl matched Thomas’ DNA profile.
The complaint states the “probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random from the general population having a DNA profile that would match this profile is 1 in 1.9 billion.” Another sample “would not be expected to occur more than once among unrelated individuals in the world population,” according to police.
A warrant was issued for Thomas’ arrest last week after he didn’t report to a remote hearing related to a Brown County charge.